EA top brass "laughed" at Kotick soul-sucker remark

EA communications boss Jeff Brown has claimed that no one at EA took seriously a comment from Activision boss Bobby Kotick that EA "did a very good job of taking the soul out of a lot of the studios it acquired.”

"The truth is, everyone laughed," said Brown, talking to NewsWeek.

"In the past year EA has made radical changes to decentralize the company and put creative control back in the hands of development teams. It's too early to declare victory but if you talk to people like Patrick Soderlund at dice in Stockholm, Mark Jacobs at Mythic in Virginia or Josh Resnick at Pandemic - they'll probably tell you that it's working.

"They get a lot of resources and creative freedom. That freedom has already contributed new start-ups like Dead Space, Mirror's Edge and Boom Blox and there's a lot of others to be announced soon."

All the studios we talked to at the recent EA Games Studio Showcase certainly only had good things to say about creative freedom within the "new" EA. What have you got to say about that, Bobby Kotick? Eh?